This invention is generally directed to electronic cameras and more particularly to capturing and building a text file using an electronic camera.
Electronic cameras such as digital cameras and video cameras are popular consumer products. The electronic camera has special optics and an electronic imager circuit that work together to capture 3-dimensional scenes in electronic form and are used in the same way as conventional chemical film cameras. Another area of conventional electronic imaging is dominated by the scanner which is specifically tailored for scanning a document into a graphics file using image stitching techniques. The graphics file can be fed to an optical character recognition engine (OCR) which recognizes text in the file and then creates a file that contains text strings. This allows paper documents to be converted into electronic files for easier manipulation using a computer. Scanners, however, cannot take pictures of 3-dimensional objects as can be done using the conventional electronic camera. The conventional electronic camera, while constantly being improved to provide higher quality images that rival chemical film cameras, cannot xe2x80x9cscanxe2x80x9d text into a file. Thus, the technology user who wishes to take electronic pictures of friends and family and also wishes to scan text is forced to purchase both the scanner and the camera.
An embodiment of the invention is directed to a method of building an electronic file, featuring the steps of forming a number of light images of portions of a scene on a camera imager, the imager being a part of an electronic camera that captures 3-dimensional objects, and generating a number of image data tiles that represent the images using the camera. A number of text data tiles each containing text recognized in a corresponding one of the image data tiles is generated. The method includes searching for overlapping text in the text tiles, and aligning the text tiles.
Other features and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows below.